Portrait of a Lady
by Assimbya
Summary: Five men look at Lucy Westenra. My apologies to Henry James.


_Arthur_

Lucy. Skin like cream and lips like flower petals. Like one of Lord Tennyson's women. She ought to be dressed in flowing gowns of white and gold, but she is so beautiful in slim-waisted lavender dresses that he cannot quite picture her in some other time.

He can close his eyes and see the glint of the sun on the shining coils of her fair hair as she takes off her bonnet at a garden party, the graceful curve of a girlish wrist as she lifts a pastel painted teacup. The brightness of the gaslights at a dance doing no harm at all to her, beautiful in a pale green evening gown. "Of course I would be delighted to dance with you, Mr. Holmwood."

Lucy likes poetry, but he thinks it is not the way so many girls like poetry, just out of the hope some will be written to them one day. He gives her slender volumes of it for gifts, books with cream colored covers and gold embossed lettering. He wants to read some aloud with her, but his voice feels too stiff and everyday for the melodious cadences of the poets he likes best. He hopes that she reads the poems to herself, alone, mouthing the words to taste them as she does.

When he imagines Lucy as his wife, he does not see the chill domesticity of his parents' marriage. He does not see Lucy hiring servants, or planning menus for dinner parties, or growing old and ill. He sees her glowing vivacity transplanted into his own life. He sees her brightening and illuminating the depressing rooms of his family home. He sees her throwing open old draperies, laughing in formal parlors, dancing with nimble feet over expensive carpets.

He remembers the softness of her lips against his cheek, and the warmth of her hands in his own, and he thinks that, not for all the world, not for his very soul would he give up the chance to feel the gentleness of them throughout all the rest of his life.

_Jack_

Lucy. He remembers standing on the dock at Whitby with her. She had taken off her hat, and the sea wind had blown her hair out of its fastenings. It blew behind her like a mermaid's, as if she lived in some other element than air. She had laughed into the wind at first, but then quieted and merely breathed deeply, lips parted, watching the surge of the waves. He had watched her more than the ocean, feeling such a terrible, tangible sense of distance. The fact that he could not reach over the few inches that separated them and touch her cheek was almost unendurable.

He has never known what to talk to her about. The excesses of madness which form the substance of his days are too shocking and ugly to burden her with – he cannot speak to this beautiful, frail creature of strait-waistcoats and sedative injections and suicide attempts. Her existence is universes away from the realities of his life and work.

And so he lets her talk, when he is with her. She rambles on with him, the mundane and the profound so freely mixed in her speech that he can hardly separate the two. She hardly pauses for breath, and he sometimes is glad that she does not require him to hold up the conversation.

He knows that it would be unfair to marry her. She could not but be frozen, diluted by the life he could give her as a doctor's wife, and he thinks that to see her every morning, pale and subdued and practical at the meager breakfast he allows himself before turning to his work, would be almost as unendurable as seeing her another man's wife.

But Jack knows his own selfishness, and he cannot focus on his work sometimes at the thought of the wind blowing the folds of her dress against her body. He dreams restlessly of kissing her soft lips through a thin layer of gauze, and he wakes unsatisfied.

He knows that he will propose to her.

_Quincey_

Lucy. He goes one day to a picture-gallery with her, a type of place to which he is not often wont to go, but it was her suggestion and he is happy to oblige her. In her gown of white lace, leaning on her closed parasol, she looks as though she belongs in one of the pictures at which they gaze. She certainly is more beautiful than the women in most of them, even standing as she is against the dull walls of gallery. Her curled hair spills down over her back like the mane of a horse, and her feet, laced up in fashionable boots, tap at the floor as though perfect stillness is not possible for her. She turns to look at him and he wonders how the walls of that place can hold the irrepressible energy in her smile.

"Oh, I do love paintings, Quincey, don't you?" she asks, continuing before he can answer, "They're each like tiny windows into other worlds. Come, look at this one with me."

She curls her slender arm around his and draws him to look at the painting, which shows, in dappled watercolor, a high mountain crested by snow and cloud. So close to her, Quincey can smell her scent, a mix of the sweat of the warm day and a lingering hint of lavender. "Being in a gallery is like seeing all the places of the world at once," she tells him.

He could take her to all the places of the world. He imagines her, shrouded in gauzy nets to ward away insects, in the lush humidity of the Amazon, or surrounded by the colorful whirl of a city in India. He has never traveled with a lady before, at least never anyone like Lucy, but he knows he could find a way to manage it.

There are things he would not want her to see, the ugliness of men driven to desperation with hunger or illness, the fever-madness of the jungle, the crushing poverty of many lands beyond England's borders. He would have to learn to stay in expensive hotels, and to go on tours with white-gloved British diplomats. But he thinks any of that would be worth it for the sight of her luggage tagged "Mrs. Quincey P. Morris".

_Abraham Van Helsing_

Miss Lucy. A frail little English rose, not yet come to flower but her petals forced open by the perversity of her damnation. Abraham can understand why his dear friend John would desire her for his wife, so true she was in the innocent charms of her sex. But now – ah, how such as she can be corrupted! She reeks now of blood and grave-dirt, and her damnation wounds Abraham the more for he has seen her in her innocence.

But he has seen it before. The minds of women, though naturally purer and more good than the minds of men, are weaker too, susceptible to the Devil's temptations. So, too, are men, but they might not so easily be brought to trance as sleepwalking Lucy was, drawn into a bond of obedience within a few nights' span.

Time, then, for good Arthur to prove his worth. His hand must cleanse her, and mercy be dealt to her by a husband's care. Ah, did he nor err, already, in tainting the virgin's veins with blood not that of her fiancée? When all it was for naught, he rues wounding young Arthur as he has, taking for himself and Jack and the American Morris the conjugal rights of entrance in her veins. He will amend Miss Lucy's polyandry with what he can – the stake for her bridegroom's hand, to deliver to her peace.

But Lucy, now, in her succubus-damnation the wife of all or none, parody of what a paragon she was in life, drinking of the children who, in mortal motherhood, might drink of her sustenance. What a terrible pain for Arthur to see her thus, hair dark under the yew trees, whore to vampiric creature whose name Abraham cannot guess. Jack, too, hurts, this Abraham knows, with the melancholia in temperament that Abraham saw in him when the boy was but an eager student. And so it falls to Abraham to give to Jack purpose, while also he holds steady poor Arthur's hand, and, looking resolute upon Miss Lucy's form, gives signal for the stake to fall.

_Count Dracula _

Lucy. He tastes the brief sweetness of her name on his tongue, musing. The name means light, and he can see its meaning in her, in the luminescence of her skin in the moonlight, the glinting gleam in her hair. She is beautiful, even shrouded in the confining layers of her era's clothing. She would be more beautiful with her hair down, loose about her shoulders, and her neck and collarbones bare of suffocating lace.

He will drink of her, holding her soft form in his arms as he does, listening to her labored breath. But what use would it be to drain her simply to death, to watch those limbs grow stiff and that soft flesh decay? The energy in her bones would make true death a waste. He does not often regret killing, but this Lucy is so wasted upon her age and nation that it would be a shame not to give her another world in which to live, a twilight-dim one of mist and magic and senses stronger than she can imagine. He could imagine her dancing barefoot amongst gravestones, with no one to watch her but the moon.

He will change her to his kind, but softly, wrapped safely in the fog of his mental control, so that she need not fear in vivid color. It is not a mercy but a precaution; he can see the vulnerability of her gentle mind, and does not want to trigger madness in her. She is not the sort that he could bring to his castle and teach obedience in threats and cruelty. It would make her wilt, flower-like, and her beauty would dry out as in the skeletal eventuality of true death. He would like to see her blue eyes widen in fear, but that would not serve his purpose in changing her.

He will leave her, then, in her graveyard, and teach her to feed herself as he has not taught his other fledglings. He will visit her, and kiss her soft lips in the stone of the Westenra mausoleum, but he shall not make himself her possessor.


End file.
